notation_templates

These are the blueprints the firm uses to produce your legal documents. Each file here is a Notation Template: a static markdown document that, once assigned to a person or entity, produces a Notation — the filled-in instance an attorney reviews, signs, and files. The vocabulary (Template, Notation, Questionnaire, Question, Answer) is taught in docs/notation.md; this README is about how the tree is organized and named.

Every file is markdown with a YAML frontmatter block carrying title, code, respondent_type, confidential, and the questionnaire: / workflow: state machines. The body is the legal prose with {{question_code}} placeholders.

Why the folders are shaped this way

A notation template is law, and law is organized by where it applies before what it is about. So the path codifies the jurisdiction in the mark on file itself — you can read a template's reach from its location without opening it. The tree has two branches.

Substantive law — <jurisdiction>/<scope>/<forum>/<practice_area>/<name>.md

Documents that are about a body of law live under a jurisdiction, then a scope, then the forum they are filed with, then a practice area:

notation_templates/
└── united_states/
    ├── federal/
    │   └── <forum>/<practice_area>/<name>.md
    ├── nevada/
    │   └── <forum>/<practice_area>/<name>.md
    ├── california/
    │   └── <forum>/<practice_area>/<name>.md
    └── washington/
        └── <forum>/<practice_area>/<name>.md

• Jurisdiction — the sovereign. Lowercase snake_case: united_states (others, e.g. germany, are added when the firm practices there). Each root is backed by a row in the jurisdictions table; a cross-crate reconciliation test keeps the path vocabulary and the seeded reference data in sync.

• Scope — federal, or one of the firm's states of admission: nevada, california, washington. The closed list is the firm's actual bar admissions, never a state the firm cannot practice in.

• Forum — the counterparty or sovereign the document is filed with, or internal when there is no government counterparty. The forum sits above the practice area because that is how the firm's filing and workflow integrations are organized. It is mandatory: a document with no government counterparty is internal, not absent. internal means "no government/sovereign on the other side" — it stays within the client relationship — not "internal to the firm." The closed list: internal, state, clark_county, washoe_county, secretary_of_state, department_of_taxation, irs, uspto. Counties and agencies live here, not in the jurisdictions table.

• Practice area — the body of law, drawn from the standard MBE/MEE subject list plus the firm's own practice areas the bar list does not cover (debt_relief, taxation, intellectual_property, immigration, landlord_tenant), so the folder reads the way a lawyer already files law in their head:

  business_associations, civil_procedure, conflict_of_laws, constitutional_law, contracts, criminal_law_and_procedure, debt_relief, evidence, family_law, immigration, intellectual_property, landlord_tenant, real_property, secured_transactions, taxation, torts, trusts_and_estates.

Operational templates — the parallel branch

A retainer letter, a closing letter, a compliance filing, and a consumer-protection demand letter are not about a bar-exam subject — they are how the firm runs an engagement. Forcing them under a bar topic would misrepresent them, so they live in their own branch:

• engagements/ — engagement / onboarding letters and intake (retainers, the estate-planning intake, fractional-GC onboarding).
• correspondence/ — client and third-party letters (a generic closing letter and other one-off correspondence).
• filings/ — government compliance filings that are not tied to a single jurisdiction-and-practice-area. Tax filings that are (Nevada Modified Business Tax, IRS Form 990) live in the substantive tree under .../taxation/, coded by their forum (state, irs).
• services/ — service-delivery work products (contract review).

Neon Law — brand-specific templates (trademark-encumbered)

The substantive and operational branches above are de-branded on purpose: they name the law (united_states/...) or the function (engagements/, filings/), never a product. That keeps them safe for a fork to adopt under its own name.

neon_law/ is the exception — the firm's own brand-specific templates: the named-service retainers and any work product that carries a Neon Law product mark (Nautilus, Nest, Northstar, Nexus, and the like). It lives at the top level, parallel to united_states/, so the brand is quarantined in one place instead of leaking into the body of law.

These files are shared publicly so you can read and learn from them, but they are not yours to use as-is. "Neon Law" is a registered trademark of Shook Law PLLC (U.S. Reg. No. 6,325,650) — see the Trademarks note in the root README.md. A fork must not ship anything under neon_law/ without first stripping the marks and adopting its own name (the navigator rebrand white-label seam). The license covers the code, not the name.

Like the operational branch, neon_law/ carries no jurisdiction segment, so the N110 jurisdiction-path grammar says nothing about it.

Naming convention (enforced by the CLI)

The navigator validate command enforces these with the N-family notation rules — N103 (snake_case filename), N108 (every template declares a stable code), and N110 (the jurisdiction-path grammar):

1. Every path segment is lowercase snake_case — no spaces, hyphens, PascalCase, or doubled underscores.
2. A file under a known jurisdiction must match <jurisdiction>/<scope>/<forum>/<practice_area>/<name>.md, with the scope, forum, and practice area each drawn from the closed lists above. An unknown jurisdiction, scope, forum, or practice area — or the wrong path depth — is a violation, not a pass; the rule fails closed so the convention cannot quietly rot.
3. A template is uniquely identified by its code — the questionnaire/workflow key. code values are unique across the whole tree; navigator validate reports any duplicate.

Run it before committing:

cargo run -p cli --quiet -- validate notation_templates

This README.md is linted like every other workspace README (M-family + S101 only, N-family skipped):

cargo run -p cli --quiet -- validate --markdown-only --no-default-excludes notation_templates/README.md

Folders are created as templates land

There is no pre-committed empty skeleton. A folder is created the moment a template needs it — the closed lists above (scopes, forums, practice areas) plus this README are the map, so a new template drops into the path its jurisdiction, scope, forum, and practice area already name instead of inventing one.

Migration status

This tree is mid-migration. The operational branch and the brand quarantine exist, and the jurisdiction grammar is enforced for any file placed under united_states/. The legacy flat folders (trust/, will/, llc/, nest/, nonprofit/, onboarding/, nautilus/, …) are grandfathered: they are still valid notation templates and still lint under the N-family, but they predate the jurisdiction grammar and are relocated in a follow-up. The substantive work products are de-branded into the jurisdiction tree; only templates that name a Neon Law product (the brand-named retainers) go to neon_law/. The intended destinations:

The public template gallery serves a curated subset over the /api/templates/... route; relocating the gallery's nonprofit entries to deep paths is part of that same follow-up, since it changes the route shape.

Adding a new template

1. Find (or create) the folder that names the jurisdiction, scope, forum, and practice area (or the right operational bin).
2. Drop a markdown file named after the document, in snake_case (united_states/nevada/internal/trusts_and_estates/trust.md).
3. Frontmatter: title, a stable, unique code (e.g. trusts__nevada), respondent_type, confidential, plus the questionnaire: and workflow: state machines.
4. Body: legal prose with {{question_code}} placeholders that reference codes declared in questionnaire:.
5. Run cargo run -p cli -- validate notation_templates until it exits 0.